Spirit of Man

(For the warrior poets of the Great War)

 

There was a man once said to me;

"Why is it that you love to read

These verses penned of death and blood

Of misery and violent deed?

What joy is there to read of those

Who died in brutal shocking waves?

What goulish lust to fill your mind

With gas and shell and nameless graves?"

 

Perhaps it is to bare witness.

To the suffering that they knew.

If we’re to heed those lessons learned

Must we not share their suffering too?

But more. So much more than that...

You see but faceless boys and screams.

But only when we hear their words,

Can we know of their thoughts and dreams.

 

More than victims, these faceless boys,

They were men like you and I!

Men who though in hell still took the time

To steal joy from an evening sky.

Or to express their soul thoughts,

For loved ones awaiting at home.

While they themselves awaited death;

Is this not the beauty of man?

 

Is this not the spirit of man,

To spit in the devil’s eye?

To hold fast to one another?

To stand together, do or die?

And all the while the shells drop,

As they await that final, dark kiss.

They write of others and brothers and lovers

And bedamned to the waiting abyss.

 

Ó Gordon A. MacIntyre, June 2008

 

"Something stronger than ourselves, moving in the dust of us,

Something in the Soul of Man still too great to die"

(From "War, the Liberator", Ewart A. Mackintosh, France 1917)